In the still of this blustery, wet morning, I thought I’d do a bit of storytelling—an audio recording of one of Grimm’s fairytales. I’ve been reading them again with delight over the last week and have found a few I’d like to perform.
I plugged in my headphone mic and fired up Audacity to record. No luck. The microphone does not work. Tried it with the iMic and directly into the computer. Nope, not happening.
Of course, I have a backup plan: record onto video and toss the picture. It’s a tried and true fail-safe method. I set up the camera and read the story. But when I capture…flat line audio. The capture settings check out OK, so I play back the tape on the camera. No audio was recorded. Well, maybe my gun/zoom mic is faulty.
I remove it and shoot a couple of tests with the internal. No audio on those either. OK, fine, my DV camera is busted. I guess this is my excuse to buy a new camera. But I still want to record the fairytale.
So I dig around in my draw of lumps and wires to find the little stand microphone that’s served me well all these years. It’s out of juice.
At this point I’m taking the hint. I will record on a more auspicious day.
Posted by kuri at January 16, 2005 08:10 AMI have enjoyed your site for some time now, having stumbled upon it (perhaps a year ago) while trying to figure out some of the nuts and bolts of Movable Type. It has been a while since I’ve visited, for no other reasons than schedule juggling, priorties, and such. Also, I must admit that the new and emerging podcasting space has also consumed a bit of my web attention as of late. With that in mind, I should also say that while listening to some of the more popular podcasts, I have also considered that your content would be good for podcasting and would certianly be a nice addition (dare I say, improvement!) to the state of podcasting. I find it interesting that at this same point in time you seem compelled to do some audio recording, as mentioned above. Cool. Perhaps that may develop into something.
Thanks for the wonderful posts, thoughts, comments, art, and insight.
..guy
Posted by: Guy Mullins on January 18, 2005 02:31 PMHmmmm, that’s an interesting idea. I only considered reading other authors’ writing, but I suppose I know my own best of all. If I can get a microphone working, perhaps I’ll give it a go and try a weekly roundup of the posts. Thanks for the suggestion.
Posted by: Kristen on January 18, 2005 02:43 PM